Wednesday, February 9, 2011

How's everyone holding up this winter? In most of the U.S. we're having record cold and snow. Brrrrrr! (That's the sound a human makes when it is cold.) CHNW and I almost moved to Maui last year but decided we were not quite ready to leave NYC. Now we're beginning to question that decision. We both look better in bikinis than in snowsuits.

Speaking of marriage, when CHNW and I announced to her parents we were getting married their response was, "Bad idea. Bad idea." Good thing I didn't ask in the traditional way. In fairness, I should mention that they now think it was a good enough idea.

On this cartoon about 4-D TV, I got a couple of emails from science types explaining to me that smell is not a dimension. Fair enough, but that's why I became a cartoonist instead of a science textbook author. I can just make crap up about anything I want and let the chips fall where they may. And there is quite a trail of misleading chips in my wake, cowboy, let me tell you.

Here's a cartoon about that person (or people) in your family that give you gifts that they think are perfect for you but could not be further off base. I once mentioned to my Aunt Sharon that I liked "kitsch art" and for my next birthday she sent me some ceramic tiles with food printed on them, the sort you're supposed to hang in your kitchen. True story. I wouldn't tell this story if there was any chance of hurting Aunt Sharon's feelings, but she's in solitary confinement now with no access to the Internet, so it's safe.

3 comments:

Well I'm a scientist (practicing for 31 years now so maybe I'm finally getting good at it), and I see no reason why smell cannot be seen as a fourth dimension. That is opposed to *the* fourth dimension, which is time-like, depending on your velocity, but I digress. Don't apologize, you had it just fine.

They're not kitsch art? They look pretty kitschy-cheesy to me... but then I'm more of the sciency type, so I wouldn't understand that veggie tiles aren't kitsch.

As far as I'm concerned, a 'dimension' is anything measurable with a single number. So a TV with stereo sound is already capable of representing 4 dimensions of data (2 visual, 2 audio). Smell probably can't be expressed as a single number, because you can have, for example, more or less sweet, but simultaneously more or less gym-socky (you could smell un-sweet or sweet gym-socks, you could smell gym-sock or un-gym-sock sweetness..), so it probably already has more than one dimension to itself.

Long story short, I'm a nerd, and you're right enough, and those people can shut up, IMHO.